Fixotek: Implementing and Testing Urban Reuse and Repair Centers in Sweden

The Fixotek project is testing if dedicated community spaces in residential areas could help encourage residents to fix, lend, swap and recycle consumer products, thereby preventing waste generation and recovering resources locally. Four Fixoteks have been developed, in districts with different socioeconomic conditions in Gothenburg, offering regular open hours and events. The idea has been very well received by the community, with differences in how easily it has been taken up in some of the locations. Two of the Fixoteks engage local volunteers and have developed closer to local initiatives, while in the other two more efforts are needed to engage the local community. Non the less, the locations have allowed residents to reuse and repair beyond what was possible before. The project has been implemented with a multi-stakeholder consortium, which has given it a holistic approach to the implementation, but makes decision taking slow

Designing Away Waste: A Comparative Analysis of Urban Reuse and Remanufacture Initiatives

In order to transform the economy into one that is circular, that recovers most materials through reuse, remanufacturing and recycling, these activities need to grow significantly. Waste management has substantially incorporated recycling as an end-of-life treatment but has still largely failed to incorporate remanufacturing and reuse as possible material recovery routes. This article aims to provide useful information to establish centers for urban remanufacture (CUREs), by analyzing fifteen existing initiatives that facilitate reuse and remanufacture by providing access to secondary materials or manufacturing tools. The study consists of a review of selected initiatives complemented with targeted interviews to fill in missing information. Most initiatives provided access to secondary materials (13 of 15 initiatives), and almost all used different manufacturing tools (14 of 15 initiatives). Besides their regular opening hours, initiatives were mainly engaged in capacity building activities, which were done through predefined or improvised workshops. Most initiatives relied on external support to finance their operations (9 of 15 initiatives). However, one of the self-financed initiatives is the oldest initiative in the study, operating since 1998. Based on the results and tacit knowledge collected in this study, a framework is suggested to serve as a guide for establishing future CUREs

Urban commoning practices in the repair movement: Frontstaging the backstage

Citizen-led repair initiatives that collectively create urban commons, questioning the configuration of production, consumption, and discarding within neoliberal capitalism, have emerged in recent years. This paper builds on recent discussions of the openness of the commons by examining the role of repair in commoning. It is informed by the case of the Bike Kitchen in G\uf6teborg, using in-depth interviews as well as ethnographic and visual observations to support the analysis. Through repair practices, commoning communities can reinvent, appropriate, and create urban commons by transforming private resources – bicycles – creating common, liminal, and porous spaces between state and market. This openness of the commons allows commoners to shift roles unproblematically, alternating between the commons, state, and market. We argue that commoners’ fluid identities become the vehicle by which urban commoning practices expands beyond the commons space. This fluidity and openness also fuels the broad recruitment of participants driven by diverse and entangled rationales. Beyond the porosity of spatial arrangements, we illustrate how the dramaturgic representation of space, through simultaneous frontstaging and backstaging practices, also prevents its enclosure and allows the creation of openings through which urban commoning practices are accessed by newcomers. Finally, we call into question strict definitions of ‘commoner’ and the commoning/repair movement as limited to those who are politically engaged in opposing the enclosure of the commons. Rather, commoners become political through action, so intentionality is less relevant to prompting social change than is suggested in the literature

Turning waste into resources: Rethinking the way we discard things

Waste is one of the biggest challenges faced by our society. If not handled correctly, waste pollutes our natural environment with devastating results. However, it seems almost unavoidable that our society generates waste. Cyclical material use models have been proposed as a more sustainable alternative to our linear take-make-waste production culture. The aim of this licentiate thesis has been to investigate how to recover the material resources that today cannot go back into production, helping to redefine waste as a resource.In order to do that this work first defines a framework to address material flow through society followed by a general background on waste and waste management. The main body of the licentiate describes three studies performed by the author in order explore the topic addressed. The studies investigated (A) how design and waste management collaborate, (B) how to facilitate designing with difficult waste and (C) how the waste system interface can be designed to facilitate resource recovery. Studies A, B and C are described in the central chapters of this work, with more information provided through the annexed Articles.All three studies relied on the tacit knowledge of different relevant stakeholders in order to gain knowledge about the problem addressed. Studies B and C were carried out in collaboration with different actors, meaning that the knowledge gained in these studies have been generated collectively.The work concludes two relevant gaps to address in order to improve resource recovery: (1) the connection between waste management and production systems and (2) the connection between the users and the waste system. The first gap was addressed partially in Study B, where the possibilities of designing with difficult waste were explored. The main barrier to design with waste was found to be the lack of reliable material knowledge. It was also made clear that designing with waste is a palliative solution. Difficult materials reaching the waste system should be avoided to the highest possible extent. In the case of pre-consumer waste this could be achieved by broader adaptation of industrial symbiosis and stricter production regulations. For post-consumer waste , difficult waste should be avoided by significantly improving waste sorting and collection systems.Sorting and collection systems were addressed in Study C, which mainly investigated the relation between the users and the waste management system. Study C found that solutions that are in line with users\u27 relations towards discarded materials are more easily adopted by the users, while solutions that generate value for the users could be a way to significantly improve user engagement. Biodegradable waste is currently insufficiently recovered, constituting a large portion of the discards that are landfilled or incinerated. Possibilities of recovering bio-waste shall be explored with future work

Designing out waste - Exploring barriers for material recirculation

This doctoral thesis has investigated what hinders material recirculation in society, to later suggest possible ways to support material recirculation in the future. Since material recirculation is proposed as a way to use waste materials for new production, it was deemed relevant to investigate two separate case studies that enabled recirculation from production systems and waste management. These two case studies addressed the topics of designing with waste and sorting waste, presented in Topics 1 and 2, respectively. Additionally, a third topic was developed as a way of providing a broader context for the case studies. Given that it has been argued that waste is a design flaw and that there are many design strategies aimed at waste minimization, Topic 3 investigated specifically how design currently relates to material recirculation.Designing with waste proved to be a difficult endeavour, mainly due to the lack of a clear design brief and reliable information about secondary materials. Topic 1 resulted in a process diagram for how to design with waste, based on generic design process models. This process diagram is complemented with two earlier steps needed to design with waste: 1) Collect and sort the discarded material in an adequate manner, 2) Investigate and test secondary material\u27s properties.Waste sorting is therefore a precondition to designing with waste. Improving the way waste materials are sorted and collected is a challenging task that has been broadly researched from several disciplines. It is a topic that couples behavioural and societal aspects that are difficult to explain, to complex technical solutions, resulting in a challenging complex socio-technical system. Topic 2 concludes that it is crucial to understand what service users deem as convenient infrastructure when designing waste collection systems. To better understand service users, user requirement elicitation methods that are commonly used in the design discipline might be useful to develop and improve waste sorting systems.Topic 3 concludes that design currently does not sufficiently support material recirculation. Although designers see and describe the effect their profession has on resource use and waste generation, in practice only a third of the consulted designers had actively used EoL considerations in their latest project. In order to aid designers in recirculating materials, Topic 3 presents two models: 1) A resource recovery route model, based on recirculation to different life-cycle stages, and 2) A model of ways in which designers can address resource conservation.The factors hindering material recirculation found in the three topics could be grouped into six main barriers. Material recirculation is complicated, it is a task with many steps, a variety of materials and several actors are involved. Since so many people are involved, acting by themselves, there is a lack of control over how materials flow through society. There is also a lack of communication among the different actors. As a result, the actions and responsibilities of the different actors are unclear. To know how to best use the discards, reliable information about the material properties is needed, but such information is often unavailable. Recirculating materials requires more time and effort than simply discarding them. These barriers seem to point to a lack of guidance and common vision around what material recirculation should mean for the different actors in society. To generate a common vision among the main stakeholders (i.e. producers, users and waste managers) policy regulations and collaborations that foster better understanding among the actors are suggested as possible ways forward

Designing from the dumpster : experiences of developing products using discards

This article presents results from the Waste to Design (W2D) project, that analysed six product development theses projects done to make use of specific waste materials. The W2D project investigated what challenges are faced when designing with waste and how they could be addressed. It was found that there is a need for a pre-process, where: material properties are analysed, several possible application areas are suggested and later screened to determine one product type to develop. The main challenge observed was the lack of reliable material property data for the discarded materials, which hindered well informed screening. Understanding the processes needed for designing with waste is a first step in order to facilitate this work in the future

Collaboration between design and waste management: Can it help close the material loop?

In order to explore the current relationship between industrial design and waste management (WM), a semi-structured interview study was carried out with 25 professionals from WM and designers that have worked with waste. The main aim was to learn about the collaborative work between these two areas and to investigate whether collaboration could help to incorporate material resources into production. The study reveals that designers and WM professionals regard the relation between disciplines in different ways, being more or less centered in their own disciplines. The designers interviewed, however tend to have a wider impression of this relation. This, together with the lack of understanding of the other\u27s role and a fundamental scale difference when dealing with material flows were identified as the main barriers to better and more frequent collaboration. Even though some examples of collaborative work were found, they were not significant enough to have any noticeable effect on the WM system. In order to facilitate future collaboration, the contribution of the presented work is to identify areas for collaboration and suggest initial solutions for overcoming the barriers encountered to help to close the material loo

How Design relates to Waste : A Categorization of Concrete Examples

Waste generation grows faster than the population due to increased consumption (Baker et al. 2004). Simultaneously, the availability of resources and the ability of ecosystems to provide them are decreasing (Holmberg 1998). Keeping materials in continuous loops gains importance (McDonough & Braungart 2002; El-Haggar 2007; Foundation 2012), not only as sustainable waste management (WM), but as a way to provide the materials future generations will require. Aim and Method In order to explore the existing relation between WM and Design, an interview study was carried out in 2011, targeting designers who have worked with waste (11) and WM professionals (14). Th

Circularity assessment in companies: conceptual elements for developing assessment tools

Circularity assessment is a relatively new term that started to be used by organizations promoting the circular economy, but that has not been adequately defined in the scientific literature yet. Following this, different actors have developed proposals for circularity assessment at the company level, however they have different understanding about what elements should be included. Based on interviews with experts and literature review of the founding disciplines of the circular economy, a framework has been put together that is composed of purpose, scale, criteria and principles. This framework aims at providing a common basis regarding the definition of circularity, its criteria and assessment approaches at the company level, thus, itexpects to reduce the risk of the circular economy becoming inconsequential.The framework has been used to evaluate four existing circularity assessment proposals at the company level (Circle Economy and PGGM, Ellen Macarthur Foundation, Viktoria Swedish ICT and VBDO) resulting in a gap analysis that identifies alignments and misalignments. From this analysis, it is possible to conclude that the main disagreements relate to what principles and criteria of circularity are used in the proposals. While, scale and purpose of the assessment are the most agreed upon elements. The results of the analysis suggest that there is still room for improvement of existing circularity assessment tools for companies, if they aim at supporting the implementation of a comprehensive circular economy strategy

Sorting waste in apartment buildings: facts and possibilities

Waste handling is a major challenge in today’s society. The amount of waste is increasing despite numerous, waste-system related improvements. In other domains of interest for sustainable development, researchers have recently started to investigate the user’s role instead of keeping a systems perspective that excludes the human factors. To investigate the use of existing waste-sorting infrastructure available at apartment buildings, this paper reports on a case study carried out in two buildings in Gothenburg/Sweden. Results from the study reveal mismatches between user needs and what the system offers. The aim wasto identify a strategy that housing companies could take to allow for more effective sorting of household waste in rental housing areas, with special focus on the biodegradable fraction. The resulting strategy consists of practical solutions that can be implemented by housing companies with similar conditions